Bending of a polar orthotropic circular plate having mixed boundary conditions

Abstract

The present note is concerned with the bending of a thin polar orthotropic circular plate having mixed boundary conditions. Problems of this type have been rather sparingly treated in the literature and all of these deal with isotropic plates having idealised classical boundary conditions. In practice, plate elements of structures do not have ideal edge supports, but are in general, restrained elastically from rotation and translation at the boundaries. Also, the plate might have non-uniform support conditions. The case of polar orthotropic plates with realistic boundary supports appears not to have been investigated so far. Only a few cases involving the bending of plates of this type have been reported in the literature and these too are for ideal boundary conditions.